A la recherche de l'enfance perdue-retrouvée

1. ENGLISH From Prose to Poetry From Fiction to Reality MEDIA Videoclip:Another Brick in the Wall( Pink Floyd) Ebony & Ivory(Beatles) Videoclip: Material-Child The Master’s Mistake by Henry Lawson (1900) The Little Black Boy by William Blake (1789) A la recherche de l'enfance perdue-retrouvée

2. Growing up with poetry Money get backI'm all right, JackKeep your hands off my stacknew car caviarfour star daydreamThink I'll buy me a football team. W1 Uno? Nessuno? Centomila? “Anotrher Brick in the Wall” explores the dangers of repressing the creative self where POETRY not only helps the individual to survive the horrors of war but to grow up to be a thinking individual capable of expressing and experiencing BEAUTY Pink Floyd Another Brick in the Wall

3. W2 The Master's Mistake Mateship Sacrifice adult-child Dear Sir, your son William was absent from school today. Yours Sincerely The Master Initiation: the passage from child to adult by growing aware of the Otherness through sacrifice of the Self Reconciliationof the opposites: a non manichean vision of Cain and Abel through Mateship

4. HENRY LAWSON (1867 - 1922) Henry Lawson was an Australian poet and writer. Many believe he was the first poet to capture the Australian way of life. Henry Lawson was born in 1867, on a goldfield in rural New South Wales. His father was mining there, and times were tough. The Lawsons were very poor. Henry didn't get a good education, but his mother gave him lots of books.Henry was a shy, sensitive child. He wasn't like most bush boys. Even his mother thought he was a bit strange.When he was nine years of age, Henry got an ear infection and went partly deaf. By the time he was fourteen years old he was totally deaf. The kids at school tormented Henry and he became more of a loner. But this made him even better at observing people...looking at the way they act. Henry Lawson grew up to be a quite bitter and confused man.He always believed things would get better ... but it seemed he didn't have much luck in life.His writing was a way for him to express his feelings.Much of his inspiration came from the Australian bush, and its people. Because he'd known the hardships of bush life Henry Lawson could understand its ways. Although his own life was often unhappy, Henry Lawson was kind to others. He found time for those less fortunate than himself. He felt he had something in common with homeless people.Henry got sick., both in mind and body. He spent time in a mental hospital, and never really recovered. In his characters he celebrates the idealistic concept of mateship.

5. CONTEXT The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple trees, no undergrowth. Nineteen miles to the nearest civilisation - a shanty on the main road ... There is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind, unless you are a bushman. This is because of the everlasting,maddening sameness of the stunted trees.(Source: The Drover's Wife byHenry Lawson)

6. BLAKE the VISIONARY William Blake (1757-1827) English painter, engraver and poet, was born in London. From the age of seven he habitually saw a white-bearded God peering in through his window, orangels perching in trees. Blake claimed to have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars. He returned home and reported this vision, and he only escaped being thrashed by his father for telling a lie through the intervention of his mother.. On another occasion, Blake watched haymakers at work, and thought he saw angelic figures walking among them An admirer of Dürer, Michelangelo and Raphael and a friend of Fuseli, Blake was extremely eccentric. He walked the streets in a Phrygian bonnet. His work, still obscure, suggests a new version of Christianity, whose radicalism lies in its visual Symbolism.. In Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) the world is seen from a child's point of view, directly and simply but without sentimentality. In the first group, which includes such poems as “The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy, both the beauty and the pain of life are captured. The latter group, reveal a consciousness of cruelty and injustice in the world, for which people, not fate, are responsible..

7. Without Contraries there is no Progression William Blake’s volume of poetry entitled Songs of Innocence and Experience is the embodiment of his belief that innocence and experience were “the two contrary states of the human soul,” and that true innocence was impossible without experience. Songs of Innocence contains poems either written from the perspective of children or written about them. Innocence” is the inner state of innocence, freedom and imagination, a state identified with childhood. Experience”, instead, means the experience brought by man's laws and institutions, is the world of normal adult life, when people are incapable of spontaneity and imagination. His vision of life is made not of “contraries” but of “complementary opposites” Moreover Blake believed that only intuition and imagination bring man into contact with true reality. Child, poet and God share this power of vision Blake also believed that children lost their innocence through exploitation and from a religious community which put dogma before mercy..

8. When I from black and he from white cloud free, “I Have a DREAM” W3 The Little Black Boy is a poem by William Blake published in Songs of Innocence Blake believed in equalityfor all men, and this is reflected in this poem. The Little Black Boy" was published in 1789, a time when slaverywas still legal and the campaign for the abilition of slavery was still young. In "The Little Black Boy", Blake questions conventions of the time with basic Christian morality. This becomes apparent in the third stanza, where Blake uses the sun as a metaphor for God and His Kingdom. The reference to the sun "rising" introduces us the fact that it is connotes change. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity: "As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various)". outcast-child

9. W4 Children’s commercial culture has quite successfully usurped kids’ boundlesscreativity CREACTION What is most troubling is that children’s culture has become virtually indistinguishable from consumer culture over the course of the last century. The cultural marketplace is now a key arena for the formation of the sense of self and of peer relationships, so much so that parents often are stuck between giving into a kid’s purchase demands or risking their child becoming an outcast on the playground. material child

10. REFLECTION W5 Whatever happened to the child-poet? Is he hiding in you?

11. W6 Nobody’s child ARE you ready for MORE ? Surf the net and enter the poetry lane at the Italian crossroad ( scuola media) and find out what meaning this word MORE had for Oliver Twist who lived in Charles Dicken’s Victorian England … find out what it was like for Oliver to work in a workhouse and then watch the videoclip and add captions about the Workhouse or a short poem on what the film sequence inspires you with. BE CREATIVE !!!!!!!